Tome is Where the Heart Is
by Flagg1991
Summary: Humorous slice of life oneshot including the children of Lincoln Loud.


**Lamis (Lunacoln) and Lugosi (Lucycoln) both belong to Salvo1985 AKA tmntfan85. Lester (Lisacoln) is mine.**

April 25th was Spring Cleaning Day in the Loud house, as it had been for generations. No one knew exactly why that one date was picked above all others and no one particularly cared - they were too busy dreading its advent the way a condemned man dreads the coming of midnight, when he'll be walked to Old Sparky, strapped in, and zapped with 50,000 volts.

Well...not _everyone._ Lamis, fourteen with shoulder length brown hair, freckles, and clear green eyes like Egyptian emeralds against sun kissed sand, enjoyed cleaning. She also enjoyed walking, yardwork, jogging, and anything else that occupied her body but left her mind free to wander. Her mother, Luna, was, at heart, a musician; Lamis was a dreamer, her head perpetually lost in the clouds and a glazed look in her eye. If you saw her passing in the street, tall and thin with near formless hips and breasts, a silver peace sign medallion around her neck and headphones covering her ears (another way of blocking out the world so she could think), you might mistake her for dull. If you noticed her lips moving as she spoke to herself, you'd be certain she was mad. She was neither, however, though she _might_ go a little crazy if she saw you hurt a puppy. That was one of the few ways to permanently wind up on her shit list.

Another was by insulting AC/DC, her mother's favorite band. Every teenager, she suspected, felt isolated and alone even if they're surrounded by a loving family. They're drenched in hormones, confused, and searching for their place in the world; they feel as no one understands them. Mom, who was open with her about _everything,_ was like that, but when she listened to AC/DC, she felt understood. _Their stuff's not_ just _about booze and sex,_ she said. They were therefore important to her. Yeah, all of their stuff sounded the same, and their lead singer sang like he had a throat full of hot coals, and the guitarist wore a creepy schoolboy costume, and they sang about how great going to hell was, and they sucked, and they gave her a headache, and she banged her head against the dashboard every time Mom turned them on in the car, but that was beside the point.

Alright, you wouldn't wind up on her shitlist foever as long as you weren't a dick about it. You'd go on the temporary one.

Anyway, on the afternoon of April 25th, Lamis trudged up the stairs clad in jeans, a purple plaid button up under a white apron, and an orange kerchief in her hair like an old washer woman. She wore yellow rubber gloves and carried a plastic bucket full of soapy water, a green and yellow sponge sloshing back and forth like a beligured ship in tempest tossed sea. Her current objective was to scrub the walls in the second story hallway, a task for which she swapped cleaning the basement with her little sister Leanne. Leanne had a thing about hanging around in the cellar and playing "John Wayne Gacy." She'd skip down there, and if anyone asked where she was going, she'd pipe _to check on my victims' bodies._

Okay, wow. _Someone's_ getting a therapy certificate for Christmas.

At the top of the stairs, she found her brother Lester standing on a wobbly step ladder and dusting a light fixture, his pudgy gut tight against the woolen fabric of his sweater vest. He glowered up at the light and swiped the duster over it in quick, savage motions. The ladder shook and Lamis's heart skipped. He threw out his arms and kept his balance, whew. No one wants to see their brother take a spill off a three foot death trap...especially if he's more than _just_ their brother.

"Goddamn it," he muttered. He climbed down and tossed the duster aside, his lips pressing tightly together and his hands going to his hips. His freckled cheeks were red with exertion and fat beads of sweat stood out on his acne studded forehead. He looked like he just got done running a marathon. He wasn't in the best of shape, and Lamis worried about him. His mother, Lisa the Mad Doctor, had him on some kind of vitamin regimen that he swore kept him _as fit as a fiddle,_ but right now, he looked more like a fiddle that dropped from a hot tin roof and shattered into a million pieces.

"You alright?" she asked.

"I'm fine," he said, his voice dripping with annoyance. "No thanks to father." He pronounced the last word with a nasty inflection that betrayed his inborn resentment for Dad. Lester thought Dad was a _man whore_ and an _oversexed, impulse driven primate with snaggly teeth._ She, uh, couldn't really argue with the _oversexed_ part since Dad _did_ , ya know, kinda...sorta...fuck everything that moved. Except for his kids...and men...and animals...beyond that, Lamis wasn't sure. Fat women? Probably. His sisters? He was her father and Luna was her mother, what do _you_ think?

Still, Lester was too hard on him and it got on Lamis's nerves if he kept it up. She opened her mouth to chastise him, but a faint metallic clacking noise followed by a ding drifted down the hall, cutting her off. She furrowed her brow, listened, then started to speak again, only for it to come a second time. What the hell _was_ it? She glanced over her shoulder; the folding ladder leading to the attic was down and a light shone beyond the hatchway. The clacking returned, longer, more sustained, then another ding, like the kind you get from one of those little service bells at front desks the world over. _Hey, bozo, can I get some help here?_

"What's that?" she asked Lester.

"Typewriter," he said instantly, "sounds like a Smith and Corona BZ5 Streamline model. 1985 or '6, I can't be sure as, due to the Typewriter Union Strike, both used identical.."

Lamis was already drifting toward the ladder, her curiosity pulling her forward like an insistent hand. Behind her, Lester's face hardened. "I guess I'll stop speaking, then," he said bitterly. Lamis didn't hear him - the clacking was louder and so, too, was her confusion. Typewriter? Weren't those things extinct? And if there _were_ one or two hanging around, Mokele-mbembe style...who was using it and why?

Sitting the bucket down, she climbed the rickety ladder, wincing at the ominous way it creaked under her weight. Poking her head through the hatch, she looked slowly around, the heat and swirling dust stinging her eyes and coating her lips. Oh, yuck. Stacks of boxes, old furniture, and other assorted junk linked the walls, looming forward like thirsty trailer park pedophiles with mullets and Winger tattoos. _She's only five-years-old...Daddy says she's too young, but she's old enough for me._

A shiver raced down Lamis's spine. She turned to the right, and stopped when her gaze fell on a figure sitting Indian style in the middle of the floor, its back to her and a flickering candle bathing the space around it in dancing firelight. Her eyes weren't the best (she technically wore glasses, but never put them on because they pinched the bridge of her nose), so she couldn't tell who it was. She leaned forward and squinted her eyes, but rom here, all she could see was a blur of black; she was _pretty_ sure the person, whoever it was, had long hair. One of her sisters. What were they doing? *Stern face* They were supposed to be cleaning.

Pulling herself up, she got to her feet and went over, the hesitant clacking of the typewriter masking her footfalls. When she was standing directly over the slacking-slacker, she crossed her arms. "What are you doing?" she asked.

They turned their head, and Lamis blinked in surprise. It wasn't one of her sisters, it was her little brother Lugosi. Clad in blue jeans and a black T-shirt with a rip under one arm, he stared up at her with an unaffected expression, as though she'd walked in on him doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing in the exact place he was supposed to be doing it, his blue eyes heavily lidded and lending him the appearance of a stoner fresh off an epic pot party. His black hair spilled down his shoulders and the glow of the flame bathing his narrow face. "Hey," he said casually and turned back to the typewriter; he pecked at the keyboard with his index fingers, sweeping his head slowly from side to side and scanning the page.

"What are you doing?" Lamis repeated. "You're supposed to be cleaning."

Lugosi did not' immediately reply. "Well, Dad sent me up here to clean the attic, and I found Grandpa's old typewriter. On a whim, I've decided to write a romance novel." His voice lifted on the last two words.

Lamis flinched. Lugosi? A _romance?_ "I didn't know you liked romance," she said at length, tasting the words and finding them bitter. Romance novels were lame - she liked Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. Now _those_ were cool.

"I don't," Lugosi said.

Okay, now she was confused. "Then why are you writing one?" she asked and lifted one hand.

Throwing his head back and drawing a deep sigh as though she were _really_ getting on his nerves, he said, "Romance is the, by and far, the most popular selling literary genre. I don't know the exact figures off the top of my head, but it sells _a lot_. My rationale is that with such a high demand, a romance novel will be the easiest to sell to a major publishing house. I'll write a few, make a name for myself, then, once I've proven I can put asses in chars and get a little artistic freedom, I'll write my _dream_ project."

Hm.

That was actually kind of smart. "So...horror?" she asked.

Lugosi twisted around and glared up at her with such venom that she fell back a step. "You know, just because I have black hair and don't bounce around the house like an upbeat dumbass, everyone thinks I'm some kind of morbid ghoul or something. I'm sick of it."

Lamis gaped. She had no idea that he felt that strongly about his reputation in the family. He _was_ kind of morbid - almost as bad as Leanne, even - but she didn't think of him as a ghoul, and was pretty sure no one else did either.

Now she felt bad.

And even more curious than before. "What's your dream project, then?" she asked.

Drawing a hazy sigh, Lugosi stared off into space with wistful eyes. "A ten volume encyclopedic history of men's figure skating in the Soviet Union with a special emphasis on the work Oleg Protopopov."

Lamis was so flummoxed her head spun. Since when did Lugosi care about communist figure skaters? He turned his face to her...then grinned slyly. "I'm just fucking with you, It's totally gonna be horror."

Lamis let out a long-suffering sigh. "I should have seen that coming," she said and nodded slowly to herself. _Yeah, you got me, good job._

Turning back to the typewriter, Lugosi fisted his hands in excitement, his eyes shining with a dark light. "It's gonna have blood, guts, and titties." He snickered. "It's gonna _rule."_

"You're a dork," Lamis said with a roll of the eyes.

Lugosi sniffed and started to type. "Let's hear you say that when I'm being interviewed on NPR while you wait tables at the truck stop. Like your Mom."

Lamis gasped, then narrowed her eyes to dangerous slits. Her mother worked very hard to put food on the table...both theirs _and_ other people's. "Alright, pal," she said tightly, "you're on my temporary shit list. Don't talk to me for the rest of the day."

"Wasn't planning to," Lugosi said, then stopped. "Actually, before you go...what's a synonym for _throbbing penis?_ I've already used that five times in this paragraph, I don't wanna make it six."

Shaking her head in disgust, Lamis left her brother to his novel. "It's probably gonna suck," she grumbled as she climbed down the ladder, "just like him."

In the hall, she picked up the bucket and went off to clean those walls.


End file.
